Burton Stein. A History of India

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Editor’s Introduction

xviii

many of his contemporaries who worked exclusively on the pre - modern

history of India. He refused to accept the prevailing convention ‘ that the

medieval past was “ made ” by the prescriptive force of depersonalized systems

of “ civilization ” , “ culture ” and religious belief ’ . Instead Stein was insistent

that it should be shown, as has more commonly been the case with modern

history, as being formed ‘ by self - conscious people themselves, through their

interactions ﬁ rst with nature and then with each other ’ .

Paradoxically perhaps for someone who delved so deeply into India ’ s medi-

eval and early modern age, Stein was as passionately interested in the present

as in the past. For him the fundamental and recurring question was ‘ when, why

and how did a particular version of the modern state and a particular version

of capitalism become established in south Asia? ’ In this search for the underly-

ing essence of Indian society Stein turned not to the history of India ’ s sporadic

and ﬂ eeting empires, nor, despite his early interest in ‘ merchant guilds ’ , did he

turn, as many India - based historians have done before and since, to those

systems of trade that bound India into oceanic trade and continent - wide com-

merce. Little taken with imperial grandeur, Stein was drawn instinctively (in

common, it should be said, with many other historians, anthropologists and

political scientists of the 1960s and 1970s) to the importance of the everyday

and the local. Even his study of Munro is more about the pragmatics of direct

colonial engagement with the Indian countryside than with grand imperial

narratives or Western philosophizing over empire. He looked instead to the

small - scale and immediate – the nature and role of peasant communities,

structures of legitimacy based upon kinship and ritual, the function of temples

within local systems of wealth, power and inﬂ uence, and the socially and envi-

ronmentally distinctive subregions (or nadus ) within which peasant society in

the Tamil - speaking south primarily operated. The foundational importance of

this local understanding of India remained central not just to his earlier works

on peasant society but to Stein ’ s History of India as well.

Commenting on Stein ’ s work from an anthropological perspective, Chris-

topher Fuller has remarked how Stein, despite advising students against

becoming ‘ retrospective anthropologists ’ , nevertheless saw anthropology, like

economics, as an important stimulus to thinking differently about history and

the terms, categories and concepts historians employed. Stein ’ s own work on

south India drew extensively on anthropology, not least because, as Fuller

puts it, his model of the south Indian state ‘ depended on an analysis of local

society (hence of caste, kinship, village economy and politics) and of religion

and ritual symbolism ’ . If anthropology gave Stein, no stranger to controversy,

the means by which to attack the errant views of other historians, he was also

‘ much more critically aware than most scholars of the pitfalls of interdiscipli-

nary work ’ . Even so, Fuller suggests, Stein ’ s interest in anthropology was on

the wane by the time he wrote his History , and while he owed much to anthro-

pology, he remained ‘ fully a historian ’ .

The principal example of Stein ’ s borrowing from anthropology was the

concept of the ‘ segmentary state ’ which he had adopted by the 1970s from

the British anthropologist Aidan Southall and his 1956 study of Alur Society

in Uganda, and this remained an inﬂ uential – one might say deﬁ antly inﬂ u-

Editor’s Introduction

xix

ential – strand in Stein ’ s thinking about India for the rest of working life. He

ﬁ rst employed the concept with respect to the supposed Chola ‘ empire ’ in his

ﬁ rst book Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India in 1980, but it also

found distinct echoes in his study of Vijayanagara (characterized as ‘ a weakly

centralised polity ’ ) in the late 1980s, and it informs part of the discussion here

in his History of India , most evidently in the Introduction and the chapter on

medieval India. Stein uses the concept to argue that in the Indian context

much political and administrative power (and hence the revenue and military

functions that might otherwise have accrued to the state) remained in the

hands of local chiefs and community leaders and, at least until the onset of

the transformation in state and society wrought by British rule, did not sub-

stantially pass to those who set themselves up – and might receive formal

recognition – as kings, overlords and emperors.

The ‘ segmentary state ’ theory also enabled Stein to emphasize the impor-

tance of communities and their evolving relations with states (signiﬁ cantly,

Stein says much less about caste than many other historians of India: for him,

it is largely subsumed within what he thinks of as ‘ community ’ ). From the

earliest (Harappan) times, stretching back more than two and a half millennia

before the Common Era, Stein sees communities as one of the powerful and

persistent aspects of Indian society – in contrast to the transience and the

seemingly superﬁ cial centralization of power under Ashoka and other so -

called emperors. From the Gupta age in the fourth and ﬁ fth centuries through

to the eighteenth century, communities and states coexisted, without the latter

being able to exercise decisive control over the former. But for Stein, the

history of early modern and modern India was characterized by the emergence

of the commercial and gentry classes, by the increasing dominance of class

and inter - class relationships. This led to communities becoming ‘ decorti-

cated ’ , though still surviving even in contemporary South Asia as often inﬂ u-

ential ideological constructs and effective tools of mass mobilization.

In practice, though, Stein ’ s adoption of the ‘ segmentary state ’ theory and

its application to the history of India has been one of the most contested ele-

ments of all his work – probably the most contested. Many historians have felt

(perhaps regarding Africa as too crude a model for India ’ s sophistication) that

in using it Stein seriously overstated the degree of fragmentation and local

autonomy in south India society and treated far too casually the political

authority, the military and ﬁ scal control, of relatively long - lived and expan-

sionist polities like that of Vijayanagara and so failed to recognize the founda-

tions such quasi - imperial entities laid for later state systems, including that of

the English East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The idea of a ‘ segmentary state ’ has seemed to many critics to present too

static a model of Indian society and to run directly counter to the long - term

dynamics of change that Stein himself espoused.

Whether right or wrong (and few things in history can be so easily either

endorsed or rejected outright), the theory of the ‘ segmentary state ’ , and the

determination to defend it, was undeniably an important ingredient in Stein ’ s

work and, however problematic it might have proved for even his most sym-

pathetic commentators, it helped give shape, vigour and purpose to his work.

Editor’s Introduction

It is, though, only one of the many elements of analysis that Stein draws upon

in this rich and varied History and it is perhaps the author ’ s more general

discussion of community, class and state, to say nothing of his remarkable

grasp of the broad sweep of Indian history, that makes this book such a sig-

niﬁ cant and, one might surmise, enduring work of historical interpretation

and scholarly endeavour.

With the help of Dorothy Stein, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Wash-

brook, the ﬁ rst edition of this book was published by Blackwell in 1998, two

years after Burton Stein ’ s death. As part of his search for the long view of

Indian history, Stein concluded not, as was once the convention, with the

departure of the British in 1947 and the accompanying partition of the sub-

continent, but continued the discussion in Chapter 9 , ‘ New States, Old

Nations ’ , through the early years of independence in the two post - colonial

successor states, India and Pakistan, roughly up to the formation of Bangladesh

from East Pakistan in 1971, though parts of this chapter also touch upon later

developments as well. For the present edition, Stein ’ s original text has been

retained almost entirely as originally published, with a few minor amendments

and a little reordering of material, but, in order to bring the History up to date

the ‘ Further Reading ’ section has been enlarged and updated, the maps have

been redrawn and a new chapter, entitled ‘ Another India ’ , has been added

by the editor to cover developments up to the early years of the twenty - ﬁ rst

century and to relate these back to Stein ’ s own historical concerns.

THE MAIN PUBLISHED WORKS OF

BURTON STEIN

(ed.), Essays on South India ( Delhi : Manohar , 1975 : republished 1997).

(ed.), South Indian Temples: An Analytical Reconsideration ( New Delhi : Vikas , 1978 ).

Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India ( Delhi : Oxford University Press , 1980 ;

republished 1999).

Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire ( Delhi : Oxford

University Press , 1989 ).

Vijayanagara (New Cambridge History of India, Volume I: 2) (Cambridge : Cambridge

University Press , 1989 ).

(ed.), The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770 – 1900 ( Delhi : Oxford Uni-

versity Press , 1992 ).

(ed.) with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia

( Delhi : Oxford University Press , 1996 ).

A History of India ( Oxford : Blackwell , 1998 ; second edition 2010).

NOTES TO EDITOR ’ S INTRODUCTION

1 Harbans Mukhia , ‘ Review of Burton Stein, A History of India ’ , Studies in History ,

15 ( 1 ), 1999 , pp. 169 – 71 .

2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam , ‘ Agreeing to disagree: Burton Stein on Vijayanagara ’ ,

South Asia Research , 17 ( 2 ), 1997 , p. 130 .

Editor’s Introduction

xxi

3 Burton Stein , Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of

Empire . Delhi : Oxford University Press , 1989 , pp. 3 – 4 .

4 These and the following comments by Christopher Bayly, David Washbrook and

Christopher Fuller are taken from a workshop held at the School of Oriental and

African Studies on 17 September 1996 to commemorate Burton Stein and his

contribution to Indian history. The papers from which they were taken appeared

in South Asia Research , 17(2), 1997, and parts of them were included in the ﬁ rst

edition of this book.

5 Subrahmanyam, ‘ Agreeing to disagree ’ , pp. 127 – 38. For a particularly critical view

of the ‘ segmentary state ’ theory and its application to south India, see R. Cham-

palakshmi , ‘ Review of Burton Stein, Vijayanagara ’ , Studies in History , 8 ( 1 ), 1992 ,

pp. 151 – 6 .

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO

FIRST EDITION

W hen the author of a book has died before completing his work,

those to whom this task has fallen are doubly indebted to the many scholars

and experts who so generously contribute their time, labour and knowledge

to assist them. In addition to the unknown colleagues and students who, over

the years, read the early drafts and discussed his ideas with the author, in this

instance, therefore, heartfelt thanks and appreciation must go to Champakka

Lakshmi, Indrani Chatterjee, Sumit Guha, David Kellogg, R. I. Moore,

Harbans Mukhia, Joseph E. Schwartzberg and Romila Thapar, who answered

questions, read the text, in part or in whole, and/or made detailed comments

and suggestions as to both style and contents.

For assistance with the illustrations, we are indebted to Vivek Nanda,

Richard Blurton, K. Gajendran, Rod Hamilton, Harald Lechenperg, George

Michell, Divia Patel, N. Ram and Deborah Swallow. Joseph Schwartzberg

designed the maps, which were executed by Philip A. Schwartzberg of Merid-

ian Mapping. For contributions to the suggestions for further reading we are

indebted to Sumit Guha, Barbara Harriss - White, David Ludden, George

Michell and Harbans Mukhia and Frits Staal. And, ﬁ nally, an unusual debt

of gratitude is owed the staff of Blackwell Publishers, who commissioned this

work, provided unstinting and sympathetic guidance, and patiently bore with

the unavoidable delays: John Davey, Emma Gotch, Tessa Harvey, Leanda

Shrimpton, John Taylor and no doubt others whose identity we do not know.

At this point, it is customary to remind the reader that responsibility for any

remaining errors and infelicities belongs to the author, but in this case it must

inevitably be divided with the editors.

Dorothy Stein

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

David A. Washbrook

London , 1997

PART I